I do hope you’re enjoying the educational aspect of this blog but, I confess, it is a spit in the ocean compared to the vastness of fiction, non-fiction, periodicals and white papers in the topic of Parapsychology. I have read a few dozen or more to diminish my ignorance, and though they have been helpful, I have found “Our Secret Powers” to be my new favorite go-to book. It is filled with so much enjoyably wrought information, I struggle to disseminate it properly in a simple blog entry, but I will try to touch on some of my favorite highlights.
I enjoy watching the Youtube channel “New Thinking Allowed” hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove which pretty much covers everything parapsychological amongst other esoteric topics. I stumbled across an interview with the author Terje Simonsen who is a Norwegian journalist of esoteric traditions. Though much of the interview touched on the previous books the author has penned, they also spoke a bit about “Our Secret Powers” which intrigued me enough to purchase the Ebook.
If you’re a die-hard paranormal fan or believe in ESP, this book will educate you on the history of parapsychology, the types of ESP that exist and provide some fun stories of psychics in action. However, its main goal is to convince fence-sitters and mild skeptics that ESP and paranormal phenomena do exist and that scientists other than parapsychologists have found compelling evidence to support ESP. The author provides logical arguments to support his position and even outs some scientists (Marie Curie and Isaac Newton among them) as believers in occultism.
Chapter One begins with the recent archeological finding of King Richard III’s remains under a parking lot in London. The account of Philippa Langley, a screenplay writer
However, threaded throughout is the question “How did this happen?” How did a man named Swedenborg in 1759 describe a fire in Stockholm from about fifty miles away as it was happening? How did objects appear in mid-air in a kindergarten room and land on the floor unscathed? How did a man heal a baby suffering from months of cholic without ever having met the child? Do we live in a world where a field of consciousness links us all together? Is time a block where future and past are simply a construct of our brains?
Also liberally peppered amongst the anecdotes looms the scientist’s dilemma. There is no society more authoritarian than that of the experimental scientist. They must toe the line of conventionality building upon the structures of their predecessors never to deviate or suffer censure. Those mavericks who point and laugh at convention send their white papers to stuffy periodicals hoping for publication. But more often than not they suffer the worst possible fate: “The Emperor’s Wrath”. Scathing rebukes from fellow scientists follow such “offending” articles and the funding for these mavericks dries up. Parapsychologists can’t even catch a break on Wikipedia! Scientific method insists upon replication of experiments to prove the hypothesis, but paranormal phenomena are not so easily replicated. As a result, parapsychology, more of a non-physical, soft science, receives scorn from physical scientists. If more of those skeptical academics were to read this book, it might bring them around to the possibility that parapsychological study is worth expanding their views beyond the scientific method.